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Twitter for News?
Old 04-20-2014, 08:59 AM   #1
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Twitter for News?

On another thread, Nords, you said:

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These days I get more news from Twitter than I've ever gleaned from TV or radio.
Can you (or someone else) elaborate on that? I haven't seen Twitter as a news source yet.
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Old 04-20-2014, 09:04 AM   #2
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Originally Posted by TromboneAl View Post
I haven't seen Twitter as a news source yet.
I don't have a twitter account - can't get past the term used for account holders...
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Old 04-20-2014, 11:34 AM   #3
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Follow @AP, the Associated Press, on Twitter. What you get are headlines with links to full story. I prefer that on a smartphone. On tablet, I usually go for an app.
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Old 04-20-2014, 01:36 PM   #4
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I follow CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk), msnbc.com breaking (@msnbc_breaking), CNBC (@CNBC), Wall Street Journal (@wsj) and Richard Engel the foreign correspondent for NBC (@RichardEngel). You can also get info on all of the National Parks collectively or individually. I get info for the Smoky Mountains National Park, which is a good heads up for weather and road closures. I also follow NASA(@NASA) and Robert Powell who is a retirement writer for MarketWatch (@rjpiii).
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Old 04-20-2014, 02:21 PM   #5
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I don't have a twitter account - can't get past the term used for account holders...
Personally, I think it's a Truly Wonderful Information Technology, but you might consider signing up for a Really Exceptional Worldwide account having optimal options.
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Old 04-20-2014, 02:25 PM   #6
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Personally, I think it's a Truly Wonderful Information Technology, but you might consider signing up for a Really Exceptional Worldwide account having optimal options.
What a Bright Shining example of social networking.
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Old 04-20-2014, 02:29 PM   #7
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Old 04-20-2014, 02:34 PM   #8
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When the Malaysian aircraft disappeared, it became apparent after a couple of days the media was being led on an increasingly wild set of goose chases by the Malaysian authorities and some other folks. Poking around Twitter, I found a couple of knowledgeable commercial pilots that fly internationally, a former DOT Inspector General, and an attorney specializing in aviation litigation. After the WSJ started publishing articles demonstrating better knowledge and contacts than most of the MSM, I added the primary author. A couple of times a day I would look at posts from those folks, coming away with a much better understanding of the situation than I could get from the constantly changing stories labeled "breaking news" by CNN.

What passes for news these days is not very informative and always seems to accompanied by a sense of urgency and importance that may or may not be accurate.
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Old 04-20-2014, 05:17 PM   #9
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I follow a lot of the mainstream media on Twitter and often they are just repeating each other. But the links to the full story are handy. I follow local news, too.

The most interesting person I follow is my 29 year old son. He's into science and tech and politics and he retweets all kinds of things. He follows far more interesting things than I do.
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Old 04-20-2014, 05:53 PM   #10
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Personally, I think it's a Truly Wonderful Information Technology, but you might consider signing up for a Really Exceptional Worldwide account having optimal options.
Don't you mean the Really Exceptional Worldwide And Hooey-filled Organized Omnibus account?
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Old 04-20-2014, 06:02 PM   #11
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Don't you mean the Really Exceptional Worldwide And Hooey-filled Organized Omnibus account?
Don't post my password!
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Old 04-21-2014, 05:35 AM   #12
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I use Twitter as a central source of news of all types. If for example you want news and your preferred sources are CNN, NBC and your local CBS station, you simply follow all three and you can see links to their stories in real time and simply click and read those of interest - all in one web location. Then add following cycling, jazz, piano and other sites of interest and you get links to all the news you want, in one site, tailor made for you. Much easier than going to many multiple sites. It's great IMO.
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Old 04-24-2014, 06:13 PM   #13
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Came across an interesting news app - [inside]. The link takes you to the online version. There is an iPhone app, and soon, an Android one.
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Old 04-26-2014, 12:48 PM   #14
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Can you (or someone else) elaborate on that? I haven't seen Twitter as a news source yet.
I follow a number of sites for writing/blogging inspiration, like @MilitaryTimes and MOAA (@MilitaryOfficer). Others I follow to keep track of announcements, like the Thrift Savings Plan (@tsp4gov).

The rest of the 40+ Twitter accounts that I follow are mostly bloggers. I don't see how people can really keep track of more accounts than that, and frankly not all of those follows are worth following 100% of the time. I get mightily tired of MOAA's blow-by-blow conference tweets of photos of someone on a stage with a podium and a PowerPoint screen... repeated every 10 minutes... retweeting someone else's photo of the same objects from a slightly different angle... all day long... and retweeted all night.

I'm entertained by the "Trends" window. I leave mine set at the "United States Trends" default, but you can tweak it by location. It's mostly short-lived topics like a sports event or a TV show or a celebrity fail. It's an eye-opening glimpse of pop culture. However I've learned that if your name is trending in Twitter's top three then you're either in the emergency room or trying to make bail... or maybe dead.

Twitter's real news value comes from on-scene reporting of natural disasters or emergencies or major scheduled events. Hawaii's last two tsunami were tracked better on Twitter than on the radio or the TV stations-- and I suspect that they were getting their own "breaking news" from Twitter just as much as they were from their interns standing on the beach. (I'd read something on Twitter, and then a few minutes later the news anchor on our local station would say "We're getting a new update from the scene!" and read the tweet's content almost verbatim while making it sound like a reporter's feed.) The tsunami warning center bulletins (from all the various sites) were linked on Twitter almost as fast as they were posted on their official websites. I can even get traffic updates faster from Twitter than I can from the radio traffic reports, although that implies people are tweeting instead of driving.

The best way to track those situations is by searching for keywords. When you see a "breaking news" crawler (or the tsunami warning sirens start up) then check the trends and search for a keyword or two. You'll get a huge steamin' pile of a hundred tweets to scan through, but eventually you'll find a source that seems to be either at the scene or on a real-time reporting system. If you're trying to track a sports event that's not televised in your area, then search Twitter for the teams-- you'll find someone tweeting from the stadium or at least from their TV feed of the event.

On the financial side, there are dozens of startups trying to scan Twitter feeds for events that would affect the stock market. Of course they throw off dozens of false alerts for every real signal, but it's just another way that traders are hoping to get a timing edge instead of watching CNBC. One example is Contix: http://www.contix.com/
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Old 04-27-2014, 09:12 AM   #15
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OK, good info, thanks.

Here's something I don't really get about hashtags.

I understand that you can use a hashtag to find out info about a particular topic. But with no hashtag authority, here's the problem I see:

Let's say United Airlines flight 100 is hijacked. One person might use a hashtag of Flight100, another United100, another UnitedHiJacking, etc.

I guess people use different hashtags, and soon one becomes prominent. You can use hashtagify.me to figure out which are best.

Am I understanding that correctly?

BTW, I recommend HootSuite.com for a better interface than Twitter.com.

"#Hashtag" with Jimmy Fallon & Justin Timberlake (Late Night with Jimmy Fallon) - YouTube
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Old 04-27-2014, 10:53 PM   #16
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Quote:
Originally Posted by TromboneAl View Post
I understand that you can use a hashtag to find out info about a particular topic. But with no hashtag authority, here's the problem I see:

Let's say United Airlines flight 100 is hijacked. One person might use a hashtag of Flight100, another United100, another UnitedHiJacking, etc.

I guess people use different hashtags, and soon one becomes prominent. You can use hashtagify.me to figure out which are best.

Am I understanding that correctly?
Yep. Total chaos. However commercial sites and "trend trackers" like @trendinaliaUS will pick a hashtag, that choice spreads, and people trying for more followers will get on the bandwagon.

#tsunami, #hurricane, and named storms get standardized pretty quickly.

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BTW, I recommend HootSuite.com for a better interface than Twitter.com.
I see a lot of people using it but I've never tried it. You could spend your whole day on social media, and I try not to get sucked in any further.

I use Twitter's iOS app on my iPad when I'm traveling. I've done chats and "twitterviews" using TweetChat on my PC and my iPad (with a keyboard), but again that's more of a speed-writing challenge than a good use of one's time.

#Exactly!
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Old 04-28-2014, 05:48 PM   #17
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Here's my thinking on social networks and hootsuite.

It looks like a good way to get the word out on get people to buy my books, is to post stuff on social media. I don't spam, most of my posts are sharing things related to my books, with no explicit mention of them. I'm not into it, and it feels a bit phony, but for a while, I'm going to do this.

Now, I see these different social networks as redundant. That is, we don't need Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare, Google+, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, tumblr, flickr, and MySpace any more than we need over 200 different image formats. It's just a stupid result of competition.

Yes, each is a little different, but there probably could be one that meets everyone's needs.

So, to make my posting more efficient, I use HootSuite such that whenever I make a post, it goes out on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn.
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Old 04-29-2014, 10:16 AM   #18
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Here's my thinking on social networks and hootsuite.
Yes, each is a little different, but there probably could be one that meets everyone's needs.
So, to make my posting more efficient, I use HootSuite such that whenever I make a post, it goes out on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn.
Yep.

The "problem" is that it's a highly fragmented market and we can't predict where the buyer is going to come from. The best of a bad bunch of solutions is to "be everywhere".

So the conventional wisdom says that you need Pinterest & Tumblr too. What about GoodReads? BTW they all need to be mobile-friendly. And so on...

Another theory is that instead of shotgunning your message across the social media world, you tailor it to each audience. An announcement on Twitter might be a conversation on Facebook. You might only post to specific groups on Google+ and Linkedin. I haven't found a utility to handle that (other than hiring a virtual assistant) so I just try to do one individually-tailored message each day on one of the networks. And if the surf is up tomorrow morning then I might not even do that.

Last year at FinCon13 we had a national social-media guru tell us to stop putting up so many new blog posts and to start hyper-promoting the existing ones. He showed how he was getting tens of thousands of monthly pageviews with just one post per month-- but it was a really good post with lots of promotion every day. Then later that day another guru pointed out that 75% of blog traffic comes from search. In other words, readers don't see any of the promotions or the social media or any of that noise... they just wake up and think "Gee, today I want to learn more about military financial independence. I think I'll Google that phrase." Maybe my blog got to the top of Google for that phrase because of all of my social media efforts over the last three+ years, along with my Google+ authorship and my Facebook Likes and my retweets and my repins and my relentless linking to discussion forums. Or maybe it just got to the top of Google's algorithm because that's the only blog on the Internet which routinely uses that phrase. I don't know which guru to believe. Ironically they're both earning six-figure entrepreneurial incomes advising us on how to make money on the Internet.

Next month the gurus may tell us that we're all wasting our time on social media, and the only thing that improves book sales is the free download... or discussion boards.

I try to hit the one-time tasks which have a long-term payback: a website, a Facebook fan page, a Twitter account, a Google+ profile. I should put up a "top ten" posts page on Pinterest. Maybe I should add Tumbler to my WordPress "Publicize" plugin.

After that I just do a daily social-media outlet that takes minimal effort and makes me feel good about it.
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